After Microsoft's throwing away the Nokia brand name, a company has licensed the brand and is planning on tackling Samsung and Apple's on the smartphone field of battle after an initial wave of feature phones.

After a May announcement that the Nokia brand was returning, a formal licensing agreement has been finalized with Finnish company HMD Global which is mostly staffed by Nokia executives. The deal, lasting for at least 10 years, has already led to a new phone section on the Nokia site.

The first Android-based smartphones from the partnership will be manufactured by Apple partner Foxconn, and show up in the first half of 2017.

"Consumers may be carrying different smartphones now, but are they really in love and loyal to those brands?" said HMD Global CEO and ex-Nokia executive Arto Nummela about offerings from Apple and Samsung. "We want to be one of the key competitive players in the smartphone business."

HMD Global will pay royalties for the Nokia brand and patents, but Nokia as a corporate entity has no investment in the firm.

"The market is fatigued and flooded with undifferentiated products," claims HMD Global President Florian Seiche. "We believe we are perfectly placed to forge a new way in mobile."

HMD global was formed in May 2016 after purchasing part of the feature phone business of Microsoft Mobile, the company founded after Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia's mobile phone business in 2014.

As much as many Nokia phone users had heart stopping events when they forced to have their phones pried from them hands, I do not think it will make a come back. Nokia lost on many front, they could not innovate as quickly as apple especially on the software front, they also got caught in the death race to the bottom in the Indian market. This will be no better than Blackberry who too had hard core fans and died without their crackberry phone. But they too tied the Andriod route and found out unless your cheaper than anyone else's android phone you only going to sell to the people could not move beyond the past.

If its just gonna have Android on it, it will simply be another Android phone in the end. Their brand was completely ruined and I seriously doubt these so called loyalists will swing back to them. Nokia will never be what it once was. Blackberry tried doing the same thing with their loyal users and it failed miserably.

Dead cat can't bounce. Better to not throw good money after bad. At this point. Apple and Google is beyond one's ability to compete successfully in smartphone/tablet war. It is no more just building and selling smartphones but damn whole echo system.Samsung and others OK in this business because Google is behind them.

Dead cat can't bounce. Better to not throw good money after bad. At this point. Apple and Google is beyond one's ability to compete successfully in smartphone/tablet war. It is no more just building and selling smartphones but damn whole echo system.Samsung and others OK in this business because Google is behind them.

While not impossible to take on Apple and samsung....no wait, it might be impossible

Anything is possibke! The way i see it is that they need to offer up a real alternative to Android. Ideally something open and Linux based. The reason is im honestly frustrated wth the way iOS is locked down. On the other hand im not hoing to involve myself in stolen property from the likes of Google. In a nut shell for me there is no alternative to Apple right now in the marketplace. If Nokia can offer a real alternative it would mistvcertainly be worth a look. Hell they could offer a solution withba BSD kernel just like Apple. Just dont lock the platform down.

Dead cat can't bounce. Better to not throw good money after bad. At this point. Apple and Google is beyond one's ability to compete successfully in smartphone/tablet war. It is no more just building and selling smartphones but damn whole echo system.Samsung and others OK in this business because Google is behind them.

Im actually concerned about the management team but not the idea that a real alternative needs to be offered. Frankly the whole reason i will not buyban Android based phone is that Google is behind them.

Some of the comments are a bit funny in this thread once you realize that many comments match what was said about Apple before they launched.

The only Nokia I've ever liked was actually one running Windows Phone 8.
A Nokia running Android will firmly place Nokia back on my most hated list.
I don't know how people like those phones. I used to sell them and frankly they were pathetic compared to many of the other branded phones. But back when I was selling them (mid-90s) it was between Nokia and Motorola. 90% of all the Nokias we sold returned with the same fault, smashed screen due to poor design (most of the Nokias at the time were top heavy with a protruding glass screen) or busted housing due to the plastics they were made from being rigid.
Meanwhile we had a customer come in who had dropped his Motorola four stories onto solid concrete and aside from a few scratches he only suffered a common design issue with the Motorolas which was the battery clip was pathetic and snapped.
Farmers came in with Motorolas dropped in water troughs to have checked but nothing was wrong meanwhile Nokia's came in and the farmer left having to purchase a new phone because water damage was not covered by warranty.
And YES Mr Nokia man... I do use and LOVE my iPhone.

While not impossible to take on Apple and samsung....no wait, it might be impossible

How the tables have turned!

It's funny reading comments like these when in 2007 articles read "Apple cannot compete against giants like Nokia and Motorola"

Yeah, but Apple had Steve Jobs and these guys have... well, nobody. I don't get what keeps attracting new players into the smartphone market. Apple is making most of the profits and Android's "profits" are sliced up among dozens of manufacturers. How does any new company stand much of a chance of making any money? It takes time to attract customers and even longer to build loyal customers. In the world of Android the way to get attention is to sell your products cheaper than everyone else and that's a horrible strategy.

Every day I'm hoping struggling smartphone players will drop out but it seems like there's more new players every week. Every Fong, Dick and Harry think there's gold to be easily grabbed in the smartphone market. I blame Alphabet and that damn free Android OS for ruining the smartphone market for Apple. I'd love to see the day when Apple turns the tables on Alphabet in some way but I guess that's just wishful thinking without a snowball's chance in heck of actually happening.

Their Android UI layer using trapezoidal-shaped icons is going to be different from all the rest and the minions will beat a path to their door... NOT! Another flash in the pan with big dreams of destroying a fruity multi-hundred billion dollar company with a "very unique" Android smartphone. Just because every other Android smartphone manufacturer is losing money, they truly believe that can't possibly happen to them.

Zombie company Nokia is being given CPR by a group of die-hard hipsters aching to reanimate the carcass Microsoft left behind in yet another, fifteen-year-long failure to extend its domination of mobile technology. With little to go on, apart from great vibes, HMD-G do-gooders are aiming for the pie which may (or may not) be in the sky.
Just as with every other smartphone maker that had their day, such as Palm, RIM, and htc, HMD-G is pretending that the Android OS will provide them a platform to manifest their erstwhile dreams. With such a reality-averse perspective, these good folks may have actually not noticed that even Samsung, the only Android handset maker to make a profit, has just imploded. They may do well to ask 'why?'
Windows provided an open desktop platform as long as everything was approved by MS. Nothing strange there, just as anyone can make apps for macOS or iOS with Apple's approval. What seems to have escaped Nokia-nouveau is that Android doesn't work whether apps are approved or not. The profitability Samsung created based on the post-Danger OS was actually added by SS itself. Which Google then appropriated - SAFE/KNOX (neither of which were safe), or had altered - TouchWiz (greatly toned down from its hey-days of 2012/2013). Google even told SS to stop copying Apple so closely.
Never-the-less, blogs and commenters all across the decontextualised Internet are singing the praises of yet another 'iOS-killer', of which all examples have been 100% failures. We can only hope that the anti-Apple types will prompt their chosen anti-saviors of good design and safely secured smartphones to create a business model that prevents blatant theft of developer's work. At least.
I want to see a company come the same way Apple has - build an integrated hard/software platform that allows people to create software for the customers yet that doesn't demand a complete absence of privacy and security! I really believe that neither MS nor Goog, nor even SS (if it ever got its own OS functioning) will ever accomplish this simply due to their disgusting business models. It certainly won't be some regurgitated pile of Androidified code pipe-dream.